On the morning of Monday, July 20, as the monsoon session of India’s parliament opened, tens of thousands of protesters surged down the radial streets leading to the heart of official New Delhi. Most of them were young people marching in response to a call issued by Sonam Wangchuk, a well-known climate activist, to bring their demands for education reform directly to lawmakers and leaders of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Police met them with batons and tear gas. More than a hundred were treated for fractures and other injuries at area hospitals. Parliament’s first day in session was dominated by opposition lawmakers’ blistering criticisms of the government’s response.

Two days earlier, Delhi police officers had descended on Jantar Mantar, the eighteenth-century astronomical observatory and frequent site of protests in the nation’s capital, where Wangchuk had been on an indefinite hunger strike since June 28. His fast was in support of a swiftly growing youth movement called the “Cockroach Janta Party,” which demanded that the education minister resign in the aftermath of the government’s controversial decision to cancel medical college examinations for more than two million students. (The movement sardonically took its name from the chief justice of India’s remarks in May comparing unemployed youths to “cockroaches.”) Claiming to act on a court order, the police pushed aside the young protesters attending to the visibly weakened Wangchuk, wrapped him in a white bedsheet, and hustled him into a waiting ambulance and off to a nearby hospital.

At first glance, the man at the center of this drama—a fifty-nine-year-old engineer from the Himalayan region of Ladakh—seems an unlikely leader for a Gen Z movement that has rapidly emerged to pose one of the biggest challenges Prime Minister Narendra Modi has yet faced during his twelve years in office. But Wangchuk’s entire career has been building toward this moment: he was propelled into public life, as a young man, by his own frustration with a broken education system and the ways in which it stymied an entire generation’s possibilities. “I have not chosen this issue today,” he explained to a reporter on July 15. “I chose this issue forty years ago when I decided to work in the field of education.” His fast was only the most recent in a series of efforts Wangchuk has made in recent years, drawing on the satyagraha methods of Mahatma Gandhi, to make the nation’s leaders and his fellow citizens attend to the precarity of India’s two most precious resources: its climate and its youth.

Before he became one of India’s most prominent activists, Wangchuk was heralded as one of its most innovative educators. In 2001 The Week magazine named him “Man of the Year” for spearheading reforms to his region’s deeply flawed education system, an initiative that led to his serving on India’s national governing council on education. A trained mechanical engineer and longstanding evangelist for renewable energy, he has—often working alongside alumni of student training programs he founded—designed and built energy-efficient earthen school buildings, devised siphon systems for draining hazardous high-altitude glacial lakes, and created solar-heated army tents and facilities to keep soldiers warm through the Himalayan winter. (I devoted a chapter of my 2015 book Fire and Ice to chronicling his indefatigable efforts to harness Ladakh’s abundant sunshine.) His elegant “ice stupas”—vertical artificial glaciers that store meltwater for farmers’ use—have spread across the Himalayas and even to the Andes and the Alps. By the end of the decade he had even become a figure in popular culture, inspiring the fearless protagonist—played by the superstar Aamir Khan—of the 2009 Bollywood hit 3 Idiots, for several years the highest-grossing film in the history of Hindi cinema.

Not long ago BJP leaders held up Wangchuk’s work as cause for national pride. In 2018, when Wangchuk won the Ramon Magsaysay Award, often described as “Asia’s Nobel Prize,” a top BJP official called him a “hero of hope” for his “outstanding contribution in harnessing nature, culture and education for community progress.” And yet over the past several years the party has come to view him with increasing suspicion.

During that time Wangchuk has leveraged his renown toward two objectives: getting the world to notice the catastrophic ongoing meltdown of the Himalayas’ snow and ice, and pressuring India’s leaders to grant constitutional protections and meaningful autonomy to Ladakh, a high-altitude region of about 300,000 people in the country’s far north that had until 2019 been part of the state of Jammu and Kashmir. That year Prime Minister Narendra Modi dissolved the state, revoked the article of the Indian constitution that had granted special protections to its inhabitants, and made Ladakh into a “union territory” to be administered directly from New Delhi. Ever since, the BJP-led government has tightened its control over Ladakh, siphoning power away from its elected district councils. In 2019 and 2020 BJP leaders made election-year pledges to grant Ladakhis self-governance powers and more formal local control over their lands and resources by granting them special protections under the constitution’s “Sixth Schedule,” a provision which has been used to devolve many powers to certain tribal areas in the northeast. But for years Modi’s administration refused to follow through on these promises and dragged out negotiations with leaders of the Leh Apex Body (LAB) and the Kargil Democratic Alliance (KDA), the two organizations that have, to a remarkable extent, unified the region’s Buddhists and Muslims around the twin causes of securing statehood and tribal status.

Wangchuk’s political and climate-related goals are, he has stressed, inextricably linked. Without constitutional safeguards, “Ladakhis themselves could be completely excluded from decision-making around land use in their own land,” he told me when I interviewed him halfway through an earlier, twenty-one-day hunger strike he undertook in March 2024. Many fear the joint onslaught of climate change-driven glacier loss and unchecked resource extraction by outside actors. “There simply won’t be enough water in our high-altitude desert to support these new demands,” Wangchuk said. “Every drop here is important.”

Ten months ago Wangchuk’s years-long campaign to win these protections put him at the center of a different media and political firestorm. On September 24, 2025, he was two weeks into a planned thirty-five-day fast, along with fourteen others, in Leh, the region’s largest city. When two participants fell ill and were transported to the hospital, hundreds of young Ladakhis surged into surrounding streets and unleashed pent-up anger, setting fire to police cars and a local BJP office. Security forces fired on the crowds, killing four people—including an Indian army veteran—and injuring more than ninety. That evening Wangchuk called off the fast and made an urgent plea for peace, reminding protesters of their shared commitment to the path of nonviolent resistance. He declared it “one of the saddest days in my life.”

Two days later authorities detained Wangchuk under the draconian National Security Act, which allows the central government to hold individuals for up to twelve months without trial to prevent them from acting in a manner “prejudicial to the defence of India.” He was flown to Rajasthan and held in the high-security Jodhpur Central Jail, alongside organized crime kingpins. There he remained until March 14, just days before India’s highest court was to hold its final hearing on his imprisonment, when the home ministry—perhaps sensing that the justices would issue an embarrassing ruling in his favor—suddenly announced his release.

For those familiar with Wangchuk’s career, the charges leveled against him were shocking. Officials from the BJP branded him “chief provocateur” of the unrest in Leh. Their online allies took to social media to label him “anti-national.” In front of the Supreme Court, Wangchuk’s attorney had laid out extensive evidence showing that his detention was improper, both procedurally and on its merits. In response the government submitted AI-produced translations of a speech he had given before the riots unfolded, and accused Wangchuk of whipping up Ladakh’s youth by invoking the Gen Z revolts that had recently ousted corrupt leaders in Nepal and Bangladesh. Recordings make it clear that Wangchuk was doing precisely the opposite. In response to another speaker’s mention of those revolutions in neighboring countries, he had exhorted Ladakhis to stick to the Gandhian path instead. “I was among the speakers following, and said, ‘Somebody mentioned Nepal and Bangladesh, but that’s something we shouldn’t do in Ladakh, we should have a peaceful resolution without any violence and set an example for the world,’” he told me.

The government’s charges against Wangchuk are all the more telling in light of the protests that have erupted since—a tacit acknowledgement of its own fears, and of the potency of young Indians’ frustrations. Wangchuk often contends that his advocacy for climate protections and for Ladakh’s autonomy follow directly from his work to build cultural confidence and a sense of agency among young people across the region and throughout India. “We don’t have to repeat the mistakes made by previous powers,” he once told me. The conviction underpinning much of his work is that, if India’s decision-makers—its urban elites, corporate CEOs, university leaders, bureaucrats, chief ministers, and so on—were to tap into the ingenuity, creativity, and local knowledge of its diverse citizenry instead of following the high-consuming, high-emitting groove carved out by the Global North, they could at once do more to answer the despair of the country’s 750 million young people under the age of thirty and help show the world what a climate-conscious development path could look like.

The BJP’s leaders seem to view Wangchuk, warily, as a budding politician—perhaps following in the footsteps of his father, an influential political leader and minister in the Jammu and Kashmir government of the 1970s and 1980s. In the midst of Wangchuk’s fast in New Delhi, Indian media outlets resurfaced an episode from 1984, when his father undertook his own fast to demand “scheduled tribe” status for the people of Ladakh. He broke it when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi flew to Leh and offered him a glass of juice.

But as Wangchuk’s efforts to link various crises demonstrate, he is, first and foremost, a teacher. His own earliest teacher was his mother, who schooled him in the Ladakhi language at their home in Uleytokpo, a village on the banks of the Indus River that’s famed for its abundant apricot trees. He first experienced formal education as a form of abuse: at age nine he was enrolled in a school in Srinagar, where his teachers mocked him and called him a “donkey” because he couldn’t understand the orders and questions they fired at him in Urdu. He was afraid to speak up in class. (Today he’s a polyglot, fluent in seven languages.) It wasn’t until he encountered a sympathetic teacher who saw his potential, after begging his parents to let him attend a government school in New Delhi, that he was awakened to his own intellectual abilities. With newfound confidence, he earned his engineering degree from a university in Kashmir. 

He began tutoring bright students who nevertheless kept failing the all-important tenth class board exam, a gateway to advancement in India. (More than 90 percent of Ladakhi students failed at the time.) Wangchuk went on to cofound, along with his brother and several friends, the Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL). The organization published textbooks in Ladakhi, hosted teacher trainings, and set up village education committees to hold absentee teachers and negligent administrators accountable. It sparked renewed pride in the ecologically balanced agricultural and pastoral systems that Ladakhis had perfected through centuries of living in a harsh, water-scarce environment.

In the 1990s SECMOL launched a project called Operation New Hope to reform the education system. In many rural schools, when they bothered to show up for work, teachers had students parrot back passages from textbooks about elephants and trains and other things they had never seen, in Hindi and Urdu, languages that the students barely understood. “It is what you would design for your enemy, not for your nation’s future citizens,” Wangchuk once told me. The local government adopted the group’s grassroots reforms as its own.¹

In 2017 Wangchuk realized his long-held dream of creating a higher education institution where students could learn practical problem-solving skills in fields such as renewable energy, green building, water conservation, ecologically minded agriculture, and ecotourism.² This alternative university, Himalayan Institute of Alternatives, Ladakh (HIAL), has thrived, attracting students from across India and the Himalaya-Hindu Kush, and equipping them to launch or work for ventures that address societal needs in their own regions. In December a parliamentary panel called for the government to finalize its recognition of the university’s accreditation and widely replicate its model of project-based learning and “Indian Knowledge Systems” throughout the country.

That model cannot be scaled up too soon. More than half of Indians are under the age of thirty, and more and more of them can’t find work. Youth unemployment for those aged fifteen to twenty-nine has climbed to over 15 percent; last year a think tank estimated that 44 percent of Indians in the twenty-to-twenty-four age bracket were unemployed. Graduates emerging into this stagnant job market are left to vent online, echoing the frustrations around corruption and reservation of government jobs for elites and high-caste groups that triggered the recent Gen Z revolts in Bangladesh and Nepal.

Despair and anger are spreading among the swelling ranks of college graduates who see the promised path to a middle-class life—a stable, salaried job—turning into a mirage. More and more find themselves grinding away as wage laborers or delivery workers in the choking pollution of cities like New Delhi. Some seek opportunities in the gig economy; some, failing to find work at all, return home to toil on village farms. Their precarity is increasingly compounded by the climate crisis: about 90 percent of India’s workers are in the informal sector, operating or working for small, unincorporated businesses or performing agricultural or casual labor, and three quarters of the nation’s workforce are exposed to extreme heat in their daily exertions. India’s current student ferment differs in important ways from the chaotic uprising against nepotism and corruption that burned through Nepal in 2025, or the youth-led revolution that ended the fifteen-year rule of Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh in 2024. But as Ashok Swain, an expert on resource conflict, wrote recently, there is one common thread linking the recent youth-led uprisings across the region: “South Asia’s youth, digitally connected and politically alienated, are no longer willing to wait passively for better governance.”

The catalyzing event for India’s swelling tide of youth protest came in May, when officials suddenly canceled nationwide medical college entrance exams because the questions were leaked in advance. (This is a recurring issue that the education ministry has done little to fix: since 2014, there have been at least 152 leaks of national entrance exam questions.) The decision, which nullified the test results of 2.2 million students, triggered widespread fury. The pressure to pass these rigorous exams, and become the one in seventeen who secure a spot in medical schools, can be overwhelming. Some poorer families sell off land and take on heavy debt to finance their children’s studies and preparation for the exam, even as those with wealth and connections conspire to purchase leaked questions from corrupt officials. At least a dozen students committed suicide in the wake of the cancellation.

On May 15 another spark was lit when the chief justice of India’s Supreme Court compared unemployed youths to “cockroaches” and “parasites.” The next morning Abhijeet Dipke, a thirty-year-old Indian graduate student in Boston, posted half-jokingly on social media: “What if all cockroaches came together?” Within days, satirical online memes about forming a “Cockroach Janta Party” had morphed into an actual movement, catalyzing large protests in major cities. In June CJP leaders began calling for accountability and an overhaul of the education and examination system. Wangchuk, whose own rhetorical style often marries outward playfulness with a deep seriousness of purpose, praised how creatively the organizers had channeled their rage into humor, and advised the government to listen to them; in the lead-up to his fast on the students’ behalf, he dubbed himself an “honorary cockroach.”

Ladakh sits on the bleeding edge of both the country’s joblessness crisis and of its climate breakdown. The unemployment rate for young graduates is triple the national average. Ever since Modi cleaved the state of Jammu and Kashmir into two union territories seven years ago, more graduates are competing for ever fewer jobs: in July 2025 the Ladakh UT administration received more than 50,000 applications for 534 vacant positions. Young Ladakhis describe being trapped in a sclerotic system designed to prepare them for jobs that don’t exist. Their criticisms, in recent years, of an unresponsive local administration that promises recruitment and exams only to cancel them without explanation prefigured the admonitions of the CJP protesters thronging the nation’s capital in recent weeks.

The youth of Ladakh are also acutely aware of a still larger crisis: the region’s geography makes it distinctly vulnerable to the rapid climatic changes India is experiencing. While most Indians are exposed to the vagaries of the monsoon, Ladakhis live in the “rain shadow” cast by the Himalayan range. With little rainfall to sustain them, they secure nearly all their water from snow and ice-melt; some Ladakhis can glance up at the mountaintops, gauge how much frozen water they hold, and calculate how many rows of crops they will be able to irrigate in a given year. Over the past few decades, Ladakhis have watched as warmer winters and erratic snowfall turn summer irrigation flows into trickles and village springs dry up. Once-mighty glaciers are vanishing before their eyes. In many villages, farmers run out of water to irrigate their fields of barley and peas and alfalfa by midsummer. Some communities have abandoned their lands due to worsening drought.

Wangchuk has tirelessly called attention to this existential threat. The ratcheting loss of Himalayan ice and snow, he always stresses, has downstream consequences that are impossible to overstate. “It’s the largest reservoir of fresh water outside of the poles, feeding one fourth of the planet’s population, directly or indirectly,” he told me in 2024. “It’s not just Ladakh’s problem. It’s everybody’s problem.” In another conversation the year before, while he was preparing to fast atop the 17,582-foot Khardung La in midwinter (a protest the authorities ultimately forbade him from undertaking), he explained his motivation: “In Ladakh, we are in a very important position to be messengers from the frontier…. We have a responsibility to tell the world what’s happening with us today, because tomorrow it will be happening to you.”

Indian officialdom has long viewed Ladakh through a very different lens—as a “sensitive border region” to secure. Ladakh is surrounded by territory controlled by India’s adversaries China and Pakistan, which have a strategic alliance, and India has long been anxious to maintain military access, in the event of hostilities, to its disputed borders—both the “Line of Control” to the west that divides Indian- from Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, and the “Line of Actual Control” to the east, which loosely demarcates territory respectively controlled by India and China since their 1962 war. Over the past few decades the government’s road-building agency has been clawing away at deep gorge walls and 15,000-foot passes to build a suite of year-round, all-weather roads for moving battalions and materiel.

Then, in 2019, came Modi’s announcement that he was abrogating Article 370 of India’s constitution—the provision that provided Jammu and Kashmir with special status—and breaking the state into two distinct union territories to be ruled directly from New Delhi. It was lost on no one that Modi chose to unilaterally dissolve the only Muslim-majority state in the country, stripping it of its state constitution and eliminating the provisions that had restricted nonresidents from owning land within its borders. In Kashmir the government imposed a prolonged Internet shutdown, clamped down on the media, and arrested hundreds of Kashmiri politicians and thousands of young protesters.

Ladakhi Buddhists, for their part, had long agitated to be free of what many viewed as neglect and unfair treatment by Kashmiri leaders in Srinagar, and most of them, including Wangchuk, initially welcomed the arrival of union territory status. But they soon experienced some buyer’s remorse when they realized that the BJP’s leaders intended to curtail rather than expand avenues for local democracy. After Article 370 was abrogated, Ladakhi Buddhists and Muslims alike suddenly found themselves without substantive legislative powers. The autonomous hill development council was rendered largely impotent, its administrative and financial authority—including over crucial land use policies—siphoned away by New Delhi and handed to its appointed lieutenant governor.

Since then, mining firms have begun scouting the region’s abundant limestone, silica, borax, and other mineral deposits; luxury hotel chains are starting to enter the local market; and the central government, with minimal local input, has begun work on a massive thirteen-gigawatt solar and energy project in the high-altitude plains of eastern Ladakh, along with a 713-kilometer high-voltage transmission line to Haryana. Ladakhis are broadly supportive of solar energy—solar panels and solar water heaters have adorned rooftops in the sun-drenched region for decades. But unease is spreading about the lack of safeguards to ensure that the project’s benefits flow to locals, and some of the region’s semi-nomadic Changpa herders fear that the development will shut them and their pashmina goats out of ancestral grazing lands.

A year after Modi dismantled the region’s constitutional guardrails, another event accelerated the government’s own building spree in Ladakh. In June 2020 Indian and Chinese troops came to blows along an icy, high-altitude section of the LAC. They brawled with bare hands, spiked clubs, and rocks. Twenty Indian soldiers and an undisclosed number of Chinese soldiers were killed. The skirmish dredged up the humiliation of India’s defeat in 1962, when the People’s Liberation Army occupied the Aksai Chin territory, thereby biting off roughly a third of what India viewed as Ladakh’s full land area, which China controls to this day. It also reignited longstanding fears among the political and security establishment in New Delhi that Ladakh’s borders weren’t adequately defended. The imperative of controlling strategic military routes—as well as planned new infrastructure with security implications, such as mineral resource extraction and energy projects—superseded any campaign promises the BJP had made to the region’s inhabitants.

The incident also called attention to the patriotism of Ladakhis, many of whom serve in the army’s storied Ladakh Scouts high-altitude warfare division. Ladakhis turned out in large numbers to greet the bodies of fallen soldiers as they passed through Leh. Wangchuk was no exception to this pattern of patriotic display: after the incident he led a campaign to ban TikTok and other Chinese apps and Chinese-made goods. But he persisted in reminding his audiences in India that border incursions pale in comparison to the existential threat of global warming. “In the face of climate change, armies look like children fighting,” he has said. “I think it is like two neighbors fighting over a fence, when a tsunami is coming very close.”

Wangchuk’s fight to secure Ladakh’s autonomy over its own natural resources, and alert the world to their fragility, has taken him to extreme lengths. In 2022 he bicycled up Khardung La, one of the world’s highest motorable passes, cut out a chunk of ice from its dying glacier, and delivered it to the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala just in time for an Earth Day symposium.

A year later, in January 2023, he announced a five-day “climate fast” atop the 17,582-foot pass, not far from that shrinking glacier; authorities denied him access, forcing him to do it in Leh instead. In March 2024 Wangchuk, along with many other Ladakhis, undertook another fast outdoors in the Himalayan winter to protect what he described as “this sacred water reservoir of the nation.” This one lasted twenty-one days, because that was the longest fast undertaken by Mahatma Gandhi during India’s independence struggle.

That September he and a handful of supporters walked a thousand kilometers across the Himalaya to New Delhi, shuffling on blistered feet all the way from the nation’s “restive border region” to its power center, seeking to pressure Modi and his powerful deputy, Home Minister Amit Shah, to respond to Ladakhis’ demands. Instead authorities detained Wangchuk on the outskirts of the city, on October 1, a day before Gandhi’s birthday—the day he was slated to arrive and pay his respects at Raj Ghat, where an eternal flame burns in Gandhi’s memory. When he was released he began another indefinite fast. After fifteen days the home ministry agreed to hold further talks with the LAB and KDA about their demands; ensuing negotiations in December yielded little beyond desultory offers to reserve a higher share of government jobs for locals. Throughout further talks in January and May 2025, the government refused to budge on statehood and the Sixth Schedule.

At a time when Gandhi’s methods within India and moral appeals to climate action worldwide seem on the wane, Wangchuk is unabashedly pursuing both. He has effectively used tactics like padyatra (long marches) and anshan (fasts) to push Ladakh’s demands to the top of news feeds and political agendas. (There is a certain aptness in the fact that it is an alliance of Buddhists and Shia Muslims, in what was formerly a Sunni-majority state in a Hindu-majority nation, that can lay a credible claim to being the current standard bearer of Gandhi’s message.) During his twelve years in power, Modi’s strongman persona and Hindu-first agenda has crowded out Gandhi’s emphasis on strength-through-nonviolence and inclusive secularism from popular discourse (and even from history textbooks). Gandhi’s broader legacy, meanwhile, has in recent decades come in for criticism from many quarters, most notably for his reluctance to fully denounce the caste system and seek full democratic representation for Dalits, and for some of his regressive, misogynistic views on women’s role in society. But Wangchuk and other Ladakhi activists have succeeded in reminding their fellow citizens of the timeless potency of both satyagraha and cross-sectarian alliances. “We in Ladakh have no choice,” Wangchuk told me. “They can crush anything but Gandhian [resistance] very easily. We have become a nuisance…because of the Gandhian way, and the support that garners from the nation and beyond.”

Here, as ever, his approach has been fundamentally pedagogical. Over the years Modi has often claimed that India has become vishwaguru—a Sanskrit term meaning “Teacher of the World”—under the BJP’s rule. Lately Wangchuk has been offering winking responses, repurposing the prime minister’s rhetoric for quite different ends. “India can become a vishwaguru by promoting Ladakh as a sustainable alternative, rather than repeating the mistakes that ruined places like Bangkok or Goa,” he said in a recent interview. “You become vishwaguru not by what you do in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata,” he elaborated to me, “but [through upholding] indigenous knowledge systems in forests and mountains where tribals live, by creating an harmonious governance system which respects nature, future and culture.”

Behind these cheeky ripostes is a sincere call to pursue moral leadership in the world’s eyes not by promoting Modi’s brand of “yoga and ayurveda diplomacy” but by returning to Gandhian principles like swaraj (“self-government”) and swadeshi (“self-sufficiency”) and respecting India’s dizzying diversity of indigenous, ethnic, and linguistic knowledge. Such appeals are, Wangchuk knows, likely to fall on deaf ears among the country’s current ruling class. But he pitches his rhetorical frequency to reach the antennae of the nation’s media and its youth—the nation’s future leaders.

Those future leaders will have some strong tailwinds behind them, if they decide to take his counsel seriously. Analysts at the think tank Ember recently noted that India is taking a much shorter “detour” into fossil-fueled growth than any other major country in history, electrifying its economy and producing more solar electricity than China did at a similar point in its GDP-per-capita trajectory. This arguably has less to do with particular policies enacted in India than it does with those pursued by China, which have enabled the rapid drop in the cost of solar panels and batteries and the widening availability of affordable electric vehicles. It also owes something to the fact that India’s economy depends more heavily on services and relies less than China does on carbon-intensive industries and construction.

Still, India remains acutely vulnerable to supply shocks like the one triggered by the US war on Iran: imports account for 90 percent of the oil and half of the natural gas the nation consumes. In recent months Indian business leaders and analysts have called on policymakers to speed up the electrification of transportation, deploy more batteries to bolster the country’s creaking grid, and power more manufacturing with solar and super-efficient heat pumps instead of fossil fuels. Last month the BJP chief minister of Delhi announced an aggressive set of new policies to spur adoption of electric two-wheeled and three-wheeled vehicles, including a looming ban on new gasoline- and natural gas-fueled scooters, motorbikes, and autorickshaws, which make up the vast majority of the city’s vehicle fleet. This future, too, was one that Wangchuk rehearsed decades ago. I have a vivid memory of watching him test-drive a solar-powered bicycle rickshaw assembled by students at SECMOL in May 2005. The brakes weren’t yet finished, but that didn’t stop him from pedaling furiously up the dirt road toward Leh, grinning into the morning sun.

Even before Wangchuk’s arrest in September 2025, Modi’s administration had taken steps to punish him for his statehood advocacy. In August of that year the government-controlled local administrators cancelled the land lease of HIAL on dubious grounds. They also revoked SECMOL’s license to receive foreign contributions and announced investigations into its finances. The organization continues its core work of educating teenagers from villages across Ladakh, although it has had to curtail some of its programs that rely on international volunteers.

But Wangchuk’s detention under the National Security Act was a particularly unsettling escalation. It seemed intended to signal how far the government was willing to go in meeting peaceful dissent with the full force of state repression; some commentators described it as a test of India’s democracy and constitutional order. For his part, Wangchuk interpreted his imprisonment as an attempt to “silence my voice for raising the rightful demands of the people of Ladakh.”  

After the clashes of September 24, BJP officials argued that detaining Wangchuk had been effective, since, after all, things had been quiet in Ladakh since. But many Ladakhis reported that their silence was driven by fear. Authorities imposed curfews, banned gatherings of more than five people, and restricted Internet and cell phone use immediately after the riots. Within a few weeks these measures were relaxed, but the chilling effect remained. “Most of the people are angry.… Still we can’t do anything,” a Ladakhi friend told me in February. “Internet is working but we can’t do any protests or rallies. There are more police than before.… We can’t speak against the government.”

Given the skeptical response of the Supreme Court justices to its arguments, it is not exactly surprising that the government, in the end, decided to release Wangchuk in March. When I spoke with him two months later, not long before he commenced his most recent hunger strike, he told me that he remains committed to Ladakh’s statehood movement, but hopes to eventually hand over leadership to “safe hands,” so he can return to focusing on his education work. And yet he remains involved in the ongoing negotiations between Ladakhis and the BJP-led government.

On May 22 Wangchuk and other Ladakhi leaders met with representatives of the home ministry in New Delhi and emerged, they said, with an “in-principle understanding.” Ladakh would not be granted Sixth-Schedule status, but it would get protections similar to those applied to the northeastern states of Sikkim and Nagaland under different articles of India’s constitution. The most important concession was a pledge that Ladakhis would have an elected legislature and a chief minister with real executive powers, shifting authority away from Delhi-appointed bureaucrats—although the memorandum was vague on just what those executive powers would entail.

The announcement met with a positive response in Ladakh, Wangchuk said, even though most Ladakhis are wary of putting their faith in mere promises, having been spurned by the BJP’s leaders again and again. If the BJP follows through, the deal would, paradoxically, bring Ladakhis more tightly into the national fold by trusting them with the power to manage their own affairs and shape their own future in the shadow of those fast-melting glaciers. On July 3 the home ministry confirmed its support for a union territory–level elected body for Ladakh—an encouraging step toward that less precarious, more autonomous future.

By then Wangchuk had begun his recent hunger strike at Jantar Mantar, on a day when temperatures reached 107 degrees in New Delhi. He vowed to fast indefinitely; over the next twenty-six days, he consumed only water and salt. By July 21 he had lost more than twenty pounds. That week heavy rains hammered the mountains of northern India. In Assam, in the northeast, at least seventy-five people were killed and 700,000 displaced by extreme rainfall. In Jammu and Kashmir twenty-seven people were killed by landslides and rising waters. Downpours closed roads, swept away vehicles, and destroyed homes and farm fields in Kargil and other parts of western Ladakh.

Wangchuk finally broke the fast early on Friday, July 24, in the hospital, taking a bowl of soup offered by BJP ministers who had given written assurances that the government wouldn’t take legal action against the young protesters and that their demands for education reforms would be taken up and considered during the current session of Parliament. (The fact that Wangchuk broke his fast with BJP ministers would inspire some backlash in the days that followed; he later explained that CJP and opposition MPs hadn’t been allowed to enter the hospital to be present, despite his request. “Ending a fast in the presence of ministers,” he later told the media, should be “regarded as a symbol of victory.”) Soon after, Modi posted a remarkably solicitous message on X to the man whom his government had imprisoned just a few months earlier: “I urge Sonam ji to follow his routine as per the doctors’ advice and regain his old weight as soon as possible. I pray to the Lord that Sonam ji remains healthy.”

Two days later, the embattled education minister resigned. As the thousands of young protesters still assembled at Jantar Mantar celebrated, reveling in their newly discovered influence on India’s political trajectory, Wangchuk—still wearing his hospital gown, being monitored by doctors nearby—congratulated them in an online post: “IT’S A VICTORY OF DEMOCRACY… direct democracy… straight from the streets,” he wrote. “FROM ACCOUNTABILITY, NOW TO REFORMS.” He was discharged on July 27, and paid a solemn visit to Raj Ghat before heading home to Ladakh.